


The Telling Stone

by pauraque



Category: Star Trek: The Next Generation
Genre: Community: rarewomen, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 22:31:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1566371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pauraque/pseuds/pauraque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guinan's father lives at the straggling edge of the Alpha Quadrant, as far as he can get from the remains of their homeworld without leaving the galaxy, on a lonely desert moon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Telling Stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jacquelee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jacquelee/gifts).



> I've been wanting to write something about Guinan and Ro forever, so thank you for putting in the prompts you did! It was a pleasure to rewatch the relevant episodes and get back into these characters. I hope you enjoy. Thanks to [Hannelore](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hannelore/) for beta-reading. ♥

Guinan's father lives at the straggling edge of the Alpha Quadrant, as far as he can get from the remains of their homeworld without leaving the galaxy, on a lonely desert moon.

Guinan makes the kilometer walk from the landing station to her father's house alone, with nothing but the clothes on her back. She squints up at her destination, on the long, flat hills. Above the horizon she sees the orange crescent of this moon's planet, an uninhabitable gas giant, rising in the late afternoon sky. As she walks, keeping a steady pace, the pale red dust rises and sticks to her shoes and the hem of her dress.

The wordless song of unseen insects creaks and chirrups from the brush on either side of the path, and her thoughts, too, are wordless. She's never spoken to anyone about this place: its look, its sounds, what it feels like for her throat and nose to dry out with every breath. Even among her people, some things aren't told.

They simply are.

*

"Why am I telling you all this?" Ro asked.

It was something Guinan had been asked many times before. Ro was sitting cross-legged on Guinan's bed, leaning back against the pale gray bulkhead. Her dark eyes were sharp, like a bird of prey, and Guinan could see that she was asking the question differently from the way most people asked it. She wasn't just marveling: she wanted a real answer.

"I'm a listener," Guinan replied.

"You've said that. What does it really mean?"

Guinan drew a breath and gazed up at the starry window that curved along the wall above Ro's head, like a celestial crown. "Some people write history in battles," she said, "and the rise and fall of empires. My people write it in lives. That's why we listen."

 _Why we used to,_ her mind uncomfortably supplied. She silently told the thought to go away.

"So, you're a historian?"

Guinan nodded; it was close enough.

"What do you get out of it?" Ro asked, head cocked to the side and peering at her keenly.

"If you live without listening, your own life is all you get. But if you hear everyone else's stories, you get to live their lives, too."

Ro's eyes narrowed. "Hearing it isn't the same as living it."

"True. But it's the best we can do."

"Don't you ever feel detached?" Ro gave a wary sort of shrug. "Just... an observer?"

Guinan considered the question. In truth, she did feel detached sometimes, but that wasn't the reason. "Observation is never passive," she pointed out.

The corner of Ro's mouth twitched upward in a tight almost-smile. "They told me the same thing in physics class," she said.

Guinan nodded, finding herself wryly smiling too. "Sometimes people have a way of coming to the same truth from different directions."

*

As evening begins to fall, Guinan climbs the switchback path up the dusty hill to her father's house. The bat-like copperwings float silent circles in the purpling sky, swooping occasionally to pick their insect prey from the air.

Aside from animals going about their speechless lives, hardly anyone calls this moon home. Guinan passes the place where there used to be a small Federation research facility, a hundred years ago or so, inhabited by two thin and dour Vulcan exobiologists. Guinan tried to listen to them, but they only wanted to discuss their research, not themselves.

The building they lived in is still there, weather-beaten and bone-white. Seeing a flicker of movement, Guinan pauses mid-step. It's a desert fox, looking up at Guinan in startlement, its long ears pointed straight up. It darts down and seizes something in its mouth; Guinan sees that it's a fuzzy fox kit, the same color as the dust. The mother fox takes her child and slips beneath the abandoned building's ruined door, back into her makeshift burrow.

*

Guinan awoke in the hard, gray chair in Ro's quarters. As she straightened up, she expected her back to hurt, but instead it felt loose and comfortable.

Ah. So it wasn't a dream. Or at least, no more than anything else is.

She ran her hands down her youthful body, examining the curious novelty of her flat chest and her smooth, soft arms. A meter away, Ro was still curled up in her bed. Even in sleep, the little girl's face looked grave, her brow knit. They'd stayed up half the night talking, which had become common for them, even in uncommon situations like this one.

Guinan got up and stretched, reaching for the ceiling and then all the way down to her feet. She grasped her ankles, which she hadn't been able to do in a few centuries. Approaching the window, she smiled at her preadolescent reflection against the stars. She twisted from the waist, side to side.

This, she considered, was why she could never leave the Enterprise. The things that happened here. The _stories_.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, and slowly Ro awakened, rubbing bleary eyes with the back of her wrist. Her eyebrows shot up in realization when she saw Guinan there, and her hands flew to her own body, looking down at herself.

"So, this is still a thing that's happening, huh," Ro said grimly, and flopped down onto her back.

"Apparently so."

With a groan, Ro threw her pillow over her head. "Why me?" she said, muffled.

Guinan lay down beside her, over the bedspread, and gently pulled the pillow down and away from her face. "Why not?"

Ro glared at her, which, on a face that young, looked more adorable than intimidating.

"Look at the bright side," Guinan said, trying not to smile and failing. "At least we're not in danger. At worst, we just... live our way back to adulthood. It'll only take a few years. For you three, anyway," she added.

Ro looked surprised. "How long will it take for you?"

"Longer," she answered. "A lot longer." She imagined herself just barely out of adolescence, while Ro was an old woman, full of years.

Ro turned over on her side and folded her hands beneath her head. Even as a child, her eyes still had the same sharp curiosity, demanding straight answers and accepting nothing less. "Do you find it difficult?" she asked. "Living among species with such short lifespans, compared to yours?"

A hundred faces flitted across Guinan's mind, people who lived bright and fast and short, like the jungle flowers that only bloom for one day, achingly beautiful and then suddenly gone. "Sometimes, yes," she said carefully. "But it's all relative. There are beings in the universe who could watch me grow old and die in what, to them, is just the blink of an eye."

"It's hard to imagine," Ro said, picking at the silvery bedsheet. "Living that long, I mean." She said it as though it was hard for her to imagine living much longer at all, which Guinan didn't find surprising. People who'd faced danger usually expected to face it again, and you couldn't be lucky forever.

They were lying facing each other now, their knees almost touching. When Guinan looked at Ro, she felt something she hadn't felt in a long time. Her cheeks felt warm, and there was a twist of shyness in her belly. When she realized what it was, it seemed so obvious: it felt just like her first crush.

"My people probably live too long as it is," Guinan said. "We can get very set in our ways. Maybe another childhood is just what we need. To start over, once in a while."

"Maybe we're going about this all wrong," said Ro sarcastically, rolling onto her back and crossing her arms over her chest. "Instead of trying to cure us, they should be sending the rest of the crew out in shuttlecraft trying to reproduce the results."

"At least the ones who could stand to loosen up a little," Guinan added.

Ro gave her an attempt at a scathing look, but Guinan was grinning, and after a moment Ro's shoulders began to shake in silent giggles. Guinan had noticed that Ro often tried to stop herself from laughing, as though afraid of what might happen if she did.

*

The sky is deep blue and starting to show faint stars as Guinan comes to the top of her father's hill. Seeing his house a few dozen meters off, she stops for breath, winded from the climb. The air is thin on this moon, and she's not as young as she used to be.

The wind, now more warm than hot, caresses her face and rustles her dress against her legs. Seen from a distance, her father's house is as she remembers it: a gray Starfleet emergency shelter with carefully built additions fashioned of mud brick and stone. A cloth awning flaps gently above the door; it provides shade in the daylight so that one can sit outside, as people used to do back home. Of course, back home, people sat outside waiting for someone to come and talk. Here, no one is talking but the wind.

Guinan raises her foot to continue walking toward the house.

*

In the shower, Ro's pale skin turned a flushed pink, and her feet went nearly red. She turned her face up into the heavy deluge, letting it beat down on her; Guinan wrapped her arms around her waist and rested her cheek against her shoulder, closing her eyes against the spray. It had been a long time since she'd bathed in water, but Ro preferred it over the sonic showers, which she said always left her feeling still dirty.

As they stood together, Guinan felt this moment carefully — the humid steam heavy in her lungs like the Tarcassian rainforest, and Ro pressed back against her, her body lean and strong and tense.

After the shower, they went to bed together. Their friendship had slipped into this so gradually that Guinan scarcely noticed, which, as it happened, was her favorite way to become someone's lover.

Limbs entwined, breath slowing, they lay together. Guinan knew for a long time that Ro was working up to saying something, but she didn't hurry it. Her forehead was pressed against Guinan's chest, above her breasts.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," Ro whispered, her words almost swallowed up by the pulsing hum of the Enterprise's idling engines. "There's a mission."

"Will you be gone long?" Guinan asked lightly, knowing there would likely not be a real answer.

"I don't—" Ro interrupted herself and looked up at her. Guinan could only see the outlines of her features in the near-darkness, and somehow that made Ro's anxiety even starker. "They want me to infiltrate the Maquis."

"Sounds dangerous."

"It— I can—" Ro shook her head, as if trying to say several different things at once. "I need to do this." She gave Guinan a piercing look, as though searching for permission.

Contrary to popular perception, Guinan didn't know everything. In fact, sometimes she felt she didn't know much of anything at all. "I trust you to make the right decisions about your life," she said.

Ro's eyes widened, thunderstruck, as though no one had ever said anything like that to her before.

*

The door to Guinan's father's house is not locked. When she opens it, he doesn't look up, though she knows he can hear her. His broad frame is seated on a low stool, and he's stirring a pot of vegetables over a fire.

"Father," she says.

He sighs heavily, and then turns. His eyes are rimmed smoky-red and his face is unsmiling. "What is it, summerfly?" he asks, as though she's not just walked in from across the galaxy, but merely from another room.

The summerfly is a pollinator, known for flitting from one plant to another, never staying long. Her father has called her that since she was little — the first time she was little — and he still does, even though since the Borg came, there are no summerflies anymore.

She sits down beside him, kneeling on a mat made from a cut-up Starfleet carpet. Gray, of course. "What's for dinner?"

"Succulents," he says, lifting one out of the pot with the slotted metal spoon. "Surprisingly edible." As always, her father's voice rumbles like deep caverns, and she's surprised at how good it feels to be near him again, how safe and relaxed.

"I want to tell you a story," she says.

He grunts, shoves the stool back, and rises. His head almost brushes the ceiling as he picks up a flask from a shelf and hands it to her. "Drink," he says. "It's not safe to walk in the desert without water."

"I knew the way," she protests, feeling like a kid again, but she takes it, and drinks. It's real water, tasting of minerals and impurities. It's been a long time since she tasted anything but replicator water — cold, blank, and severe.

"Father," she starts again.

"I don't do this anymore," he interrupts, with a short slicing gesture through the air. "The old ways are dead. I'm letting them lie." He towers over her, not threatening, but powerful. Strong and stern — a defender of his people. Of his family, more than anything. Picard reminds her of this man, sometimes.

She repeats quietly, "I want to tell you a story."

They stare at each other for a few moments, his nostrils flaring, her face calm and smooth, shining in the firelight. After a time, his eyes soften. "You're too stubborn for your own good," he grouses, and moves to take a dusty box from the shelf.

She draws her lips into her mouth, trying not to smile. "Can't imagine where I got that from."

He gives her a warning look as he kneels down in front of her, slowly, careful of his knees and back. He puts the box down between them on the floor, and opens it.

Inside, there is a stone. It doesn't look like much; it could be one of any, here on this moon or on a thousand other planets. It is rough and bluish-brown, weighing a kilogram or two. But this stone, which sits on the floor of a shelter in the desert, between a father and daughter, comes from a world that is no more.

The father looks at his daughter. He is tired and saddened, and has lost much.

"Tell me," he says.

"This is a story," the daughter begins, "about a woman named Ro Laren."

She speaks, and he listens. The stone is neither speaker nor listener — it is the link between the two. It is the moment of the telling. And as the story is told, it does not vanish into the desert air, but its telling is held within this stone, which begins to glow blue and bright as the daughter speaks.

This stone hears the story of Ro Laren, as Guinan heard it when she listened, and as she tells it to her father. And although there are not many stones like it anymore, this stone will remember, long after all three people are gone.


End file.
